The Essential Surrealism

Surrealism, the wonderfully weird literary and artistic movement that grew out of the 1920s and 1930s, was founded by Andre Breton in 1924 as a dreamlike, stream-of-consciousness reaction to the rationalism that had dominated European culture and politics up until World War I. Influenced by the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, the fun-loving Surrealists harnessed the forces of the unconscious, automatic writing, and the free-flowing expression of dreams and primal instincts through the use of fantastic imagery and hilarious juxtaposition of subject matter: trains roaring out of chimneys, melted clocks dripping in space, spider-giraffes-from-Hell, and more. Its members included Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, Giorgio de Chirico, and the early Frida Kahlo.